Worldwide terrorism is at an all-time high, and violence cost the global economy $14.3 trillion last year, with a $2.5 trillion impact in the United States alone.

These new figures from the latest Global Peace Index, a report on conflict and security, indicate that world peace has been deteriorating for the past decade, largely driven by terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

The study says the decline interrupts long-term improvements the world had been making since the end of World War II.

According to the report, the annual number of terrorism incidents has almost tripled since 2011.

Deaths from terrorism have risen more than 900% since 2007 in the 35 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Of those members, 23 nations experienced terrorism related deaths over the past year.

Those countries include Denmark, Sweden, France and Turkey.

One eye-popping graphic from the report (p. 36) shows that terrorism deaths in OECD countries has increased 900 percent since 2007.

This is quite a turn-around from this time last year during the presidential campaign when the media was trumpeting major declines in terrorism.

But wait!? Didn’t we hear from President Obama that Osama bin Laden was dead, and al-Qaeda had been decimated? The Islamic State was the “JV team”?

In fact, we did.

Going back to April 2013, we had senior Obama State Department officials telling us that the “War on Terror” was over, and the primary reason was that Obama’s Arab Spring had unleashed the forces of democracy by encouraging hardcore Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, to take over in several critical countries in the Middle East.

[…]

The so-called Arab Spring and the Syrian War – both openly cheered and supported by the Obama administration – unleashed deadly and destructive forces whose full manifestation are only now being seen.

This new data documents the terrorism that has ripped open the Middle East, southeast Asia and Africa. Now it is literally exploding across Europe.

Former FBI agent, counter-terrorism instructor, and founder of UnderstandingTheThreat.com John Guandolo appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon to talk about the Orlando jihad attack.

Following up on a caller who wondered how the FBI could have interviewed shooter Omar Mateen three times without concluding he was a serious threat, Bannon asked Guandolo if the FBI counter-terrorist unit was “incompetent,” or “hamstrung” by political correctness.

“It’s a combination of both, actually,” Guandolo replied. “You’ve got the agents busting their butts on the street level, but you’ve got the leadership of the FBI who refuse to look at this strategically.”

“And it is because, on orders from the White House — I know even under Director Mueller’s tenure there, before Director Comey — they were forced to work with organizations like the Islamic Society of North America and others, Muslim Public Affairs Council, which are Hamas — Muslim Brotherhood organizations,” Guandolo charged.

He also mentioned CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which he described as a “Hamas group.”

“They were created by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, which was Hamas in the United States, “ Guandolo explained. “So they’re not merely a Muslim Brotherhood group. Hamas is an inherent part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and CAIR was the full Hamas organization created in the United States.”

He said the government has not “identified the larger threat,” which is that “the teaching these guys are getting is all from the Islamic centers.”

“The majority, eighty-plus percent of the Islamic centers’ mosques in the United States are teaching this,” he said. “All of the major Islamic organizations, per evidence in the largest terrorism financing and Hamas trial in American history, demonstrates clearly that these groups are jihadi organizations.”

Guandolo said the FBI has a “responsibility to the nation to address the threat, regardless of the public outcry, or the political implications.”

“That’s their job. That’s the FBI’s job, and they have to do it, and the leadership has to get on board,” he insisted. “Nowhere in the FBI is there a room at headquarters where six people sit with a whiteboard and think strategically about this threat.”

He said this was partially because “there are fires every day — in other words, they’re running around putting out fires from all the threats that are coming in, and the problem is, just like the Director himself has publicly said, they have over a thousand open cases on guys like this guy, Omar Mateen, and the regulations that have been put on them since 9/11 hamstring them.”

Guandolo said there have been some “tough questions” asked by congressional oversight committees, but “nothing has been done.” His recommendation for reform begins with understanding that “the primary work for understanding the threat that we do is at the state and local level.”

“The federal level has demonstrated that there is no strategic understanding of this threat, of the Islamic threat,” he declared, repeating that there was no grand strategy under consideration by our $4.2 trillion government. “That’s why we’re losing the war… we crushed the enemy on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our military did what they were supposed to do. The soldiers, the Marines, the sailors, the airmen, they did their job. And yet, we came away with losses in Afghanistan and Iraq, because we didn’t understand the enemy. We don’t understand that they don’t intend to win the war with guns and blowing themselves up, but that that’s a tactic in a much larger strategy.”

“And yet, they came away defeating us in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that we crushed them on the battlefield, because the average four-star general, the average senator, the average head of the intelligence agency, pick which one — at the federal level has not a clue about the strategic workings, and inner workings, the doctrine, the sharia, that drives every one of these guys.”

He warned against underestimating “the catastrophic failure of our leadership at the federal level.”

“My experience in training and teaching federal agents, state law enforcement, local law enforcement all over the country, thousands of them — the average law enforcement officer knows less than citizens that are paying attention,” Guandolo said. “I can talk about that objectively, because we share a questionnaire when we start the training. I mean, the knowledge level is zero. The lower you go – in other words, federal, state, local – there’s a higher chance at the local level that a local police officer will have a better understanding of the problem than an FBI counter-terrorism agent.”

“The Islamic movement has been focused, since prior to 9/11, on primarily the Islamic world. They’ve been focused, as you’ve seen, in Syria, and in Libya, in eastern Africa, in the Middle East. They’ve been focused on getting Islamic countries to adhere to sharia and begin imposing sharia outside of its borders,” Guandolo explained, referring to the Islamic legal code.

“That’s the focus. What we’re watching right now is the turn toward the West,” he said, citing terrorist attacks popping up in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, which have all been “individual acts of jihad,” until now.

“What you’re gonna see is, multiply Orlando, and Beslan, and Mumbai – and, by the way, since they’re working with the Marxist-socialist collaborators like Black Lives Matter and others, many Soros-funded groups and other groups, you’re gonna see a national level, where the violence will raise significantly, and you’ll see things precipitated by other events,” Guandolo warned.

As we close out 2015 with the usual end of year pondering on where we’ve been and where we are headed, I thought I would share this 2011 article by Angelo M. Codevilla that was recently quoted on twitter by @alimhaider. It is amazingly insightful and offers a much needed perspective for Americans making up their minds on who they want for their next president. It is very long but well worth the time so grab your favorite caffeinated beverage and settle in for a good read!

America’s ruling class lost the “War on Terror.” During the decade that began on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government’s combat operations have resulted in some 6,000 Americans killed and 30,000 crippled, caused hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties, and spent—depending on various estimates of direct and indirect costs—somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. But nothing our rulers did post-9/11 eliminated the threat from terrorists or made the world significantly less dangerous. Rather, ever-bigger government imposed unprecedented restrictions on the American people and became the arbiter of prosperity for its cronies, as well as the manager of permanent austerity for the rest. Although in 2001 many referred to the United States as “the world’s only superpower,” ten years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it. This is the “new normal.” How did this happen?

September 11’s planners could hardly have imagined that their attacks might seriously undermine what Americans had built over two centuries, what millions of immigrants from the world over had come to join and maintain. In fact, our decline happened because the War on Terror—albeit microscopic in size and destructiveness as wars go—forced upon us, as wars do, the most important questions that any society ever faces: Who are we, and who are our enemies? What kind of peace do we want? What does it take to get it? Are we able and willing to do what it takes to secure our preferred way of life, to deserve living the way we prefer? Our bipartisan ruling class’s dysfunctional responses to such questions inflicted the deepest wounds.

Wars in general increase the power of any polity’s ruling class to answer such questions in its way, and to work its will. Hard times force regimes, as they force individuals, to prove what they are made of. That is why regimes are never more themselves, at home and abroad, than during wartime. After 9/11, at home and abroad, our bipartisan ruling class did the characteristic things it had done before—just more of them, and more intensely. In short, the War on Terror empowered this ruling class to show its mettle, and it did so. Ten years later, the results speak for themselves: the terrorists’ force mineure proved to be the occasion for our own ruling elites and their ideas to plunge the country into troubles from which they cannot extricate it.

Most often, wars are won and lost by a faction of a diverse ruling class. Victories validate the winners and what they stand for. Defeats usher in competitors waiting in the wings. So for example, the defeat of Lord North’s cabinet in the American Revolutionary War empowered William Pitt the Younger’s faction, including Adam Smith. When John F. Kennedy’s old-line liberals lost the Vietnam War, their discredit empowered Democratic and Republican successors who embodied an America more collectivist at home and more timid abroad. Such changes, though big, are evolutionary because they simply bring to the fore people and ways that had been gestating within the Establishment.

When, however, the losers are a whole ruling class, and when that class is pervasive enough to have banished to society’s margins any people and ideas that diverge from it, its discredit really does put society in a revolutionary situation. For example, the Soviet regime’s loss of the Cold War plunged that country into a downward spiral because three generations of Communist rule had utterly destroyed living memory of anything but dysfunctional people and ways.

America’s current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually. In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama Administrations was barely noticeable. In domestic matters, the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. Dissent from the ruling class is rife among the American people, but occurs mostly on the sidelines of our politics. If there is to be a reversal of the ongoing defeats, both foreign and domestic, that have discredited contemporary America’s bipartisan mainstream, heretofore marginal people will have to generate it, applying ideas and practices recalled from America’s successful past.

The world of 2011 is even less congenial to America and Americans than it was on September 10, 2001. The U.S. government is not responsible for all the ways in which the world was menacing then and is menacing now, of course. Regardless of what America did, China’s challenge to the post-1945 Peace of the Pacific was going to become more serious. Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia was not and could not be anything but a major bother. Western Europe would be living off civilizational capital it had lost the will to replenish, irrespective of any American deeds or entreaties. The Muslim world would be choking on the dysfunctions inherent in its government and cultures.

But U.S. policy has made things worse because the liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives who make up America’s foreign policy Establishment have all assumed that Americans should undertake the impossible task of changing such basic facts, rather than confining themselves to the difficult but vital work of guarding U.S. interests against them. For the Establishment, 9/11 meant opportunities to press for doing more of what they had always tried to do.

At home, the American people are less free, less prosperous, more bitterly divided, and much less hopeful in 2011 than in 2001 because a decade of the War on Terror brought a government ever bigger and more burdensome, as well as “security” measures that impede the innocent rather than focusing on wrongdoers. Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans. After 9/11, far from deliberating on the best course to take, our rulers stayed on autopilot and hit the throttles.

We must, then, understand what our bipartisan ruling class wrought in international and domestic affairs during the post-9/11 war, and how differently the decade might have turned out had our rulers pursued the proper ends of domestic and international statecraft.

Islam is something different. Not all Muslims are terrorists, not by a long shot, but in its current form, Islam provides safe harbor for way-y-y too many Salafi jihadists, aka, terrorists. Here at Breitbart, Pamela Geller provides a handy itemization; her list of Islamic terrorist groups runs a full 27 lines.

History tells us that no attitude is permanent. Yet for now, extremist elements within Muslim societies make it impossible for many Muslim states to get along with their neighbors, either near, in Eurasia, or far, in America.

So what should we do in the face of a relentless, and remorseless, enemy? The Roman Empire had a good answer. Yes, 2,000 years before Ronald Reagan summed up his Cold War strategy as, “We win, they lose,” the Romans had the same idea.

Rome’s dogged determination to prevail is perhaps best exemplified by its long struggle against the rival empire of Carthage, in what’s now Tunisia.

The Rome-Carthage conflict—the so-called Punic Wars, of which there were three—raged all over the Mediterranean littoral and lasted, on land and sea, for over a century, from 264 BC to 146 BC. Interestingly, the single best general on either side was the Carthaginian, Hannibal. His smashing pincer-movement victory over the Romans atCannae in 216 BC is still studied at West Point and other military academies.

And yet the Romans were more organized and resourceful, as well as determined, and, over time, those qualities gave them the edge. For literally decades, the Roman senator Cato the Elder closed every speech to his colleagues with the ringing words, Carthago delenda est—“Carthage must be destroyed.” And yet Cato, who died in 149 BC, didn’t actually live to see the final victory, which came three years later, when the Roman legionnaires besieged and and conquered the city of Carthage itself.

Appian of Alexandria described the final victory in his Historia Romana, written in the second century AD. Here’s Appian describing Rome’s final military operations against Carthage; as we can see, under the leadership of General Scipio Africanus, the Roman legionarii were not nice:

Now Scipio hastened to the attack [on] the strongest part of the city, where the greater part of the inhabitants had taken refuge… All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts, and every kind of agony. Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs to the pavement, some of them alighting on the heads of spears or other pointed weapons, or swords. . . . Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled.

You get the idea. Tough stuff, to be sure, but after Scipio’s triumph, Carthage was never again a problem for Rome. In fact, the Romans not only razed the city but, for good measure, plowed the ground with salt to make sure that nothing would ever grow there.

The Roman historian Tacitus quoted a barbarian enemy to make an approving point about the Roman strategic approach: “And where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Yes, when the Romans wanted to make a point—they made a point. We might note that the Roman Empire endured for another 622 years after the fall of Carthage, all the way to 476 AD.

Of course, Americans would never do anything like obliterating Carthage, even if the few German survivors of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, or the even fewer Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, later that same year, might beg to differ. Still, we might pause to note that both Germany and Japan—two countries once both full of fight—haven’t so much as raised their fist at us even once in the last 70 years.

II. The Challenge in Our Time

Today, there’s an echo of the old Roman resolve in the voice of many Republicans. As Sen. Ted Cruz, who frequently quotes Reagan’s we-win-they-lose maxim, declared the other day, “In a Cruz administration, we will say to militants, if you wage war against America, you are signing your death warrant.”

Needless to say, Cruz doesn’t speak for the intellectually fashionable, who preach a kind of defeatist sophistry. Among the smart set, it is often said that we shouldn’t attack ISIS because that’s just what they want. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, for example, writing of possible US retaliation in the wake of the Paris raid, assures us that ISIS “wants all of this.” And Sally Kohn, also of CNN, adds her voice: “Bombing terrorists feeds their ideology.”

We’re already caving to ISIS: Bloodthirsty jingoism is precisely what the terrorists want: The chief goal of these terrorists is to launch a “cosmic war.” Bigotry and calls for invasion provide exactly that.

Well, maybe the leftists are correct: Maybe it would be a mistake for us if we defeated ISIS—but maybe not. Indeed, it sure seems that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, is doing his best to survive. To be sure, he says he’s ready for martyrdom, but he’s not seeking it out. If he really wanted to be dead, he already would be.

Yes, there’s something to be said for winning, not losing—for living, not dying. As Osama bin Laden himself observed, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” And of course, it’s no accident that Al Qaeda went into eclipse after bin Laden was killed by US forces in 2011, to be replaced, alas, by ISIS.

To put the matter starkly, being killed suggests that maybe God is not on your side. It’s perhaps glorious to die for a winning cause, but not so glorious to die for a losing cause.

So let’s hereby resolve that we will be on the winning side. And let’s get right down to it, and name—yes, name—the central challenge of our time: Defeating the Salafi terrorists once and for all.

Michael Vickers, a counter-terrorism subcabinet official in the Obama and Bush administrations—and an operative with a record going back to the CIA campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan—is flatly declarative about what must be done; we must defeat ISIS, or ISIL, by depriving it of its territory. By any name, they—including the remnants of Al Qaeda—need to be defeated and their home-base destroyed:

ISIL, as its name implies, is a de facto state. It holds territory, controls population, and funds its operations from resources that it exploits on territory it controls. If there’s one thing the American military knows how to do it is defeating an opposing force trying to hold ground.

So yes, we must defeat ISIS. ISIS delenda est. But yet there are more variables to consider: Unless we plan to do to the Jihadi Zone exactly what the Romans did to the Carthaginians—that is, kill them all—we need a plan for not only pacifying the area, but also for keeping it pacified.

Unlike in the areas of economic and political restructuring of the old USA, where the president is so faithfully following the teachings of his ideological predecessors, in dealing with the issue of terrorism his policies are full of strategic blunders and tactical inconsistencies.

In Egypt, President Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood and president Mohamed Morsi from the outset. Even after Morsi was ousted, Obama continued efforts to reinstate the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Why? As his argument goes, the Egyptians had an election and the Muslim Brotherhood was democratically elected. Therefore, it is a legitimate government and we must support a democracy. I hate to point out to the constitutional scholar that he is confusing elections with democracy. We should have learned by now that elections do not necessarily result in democratic institutions. Elections are only an instrument of democracy, no more, no less. This instrument of democracy in many instances has malfunctioned and provided legitimacy to oppressive and totalitarian regimes. There are number of examples of where democratic elections failed to produce a democracy: Hamas in the West Bank, Salvador Allende in Chili, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Adolf Hitler in Germany, to name just a few. We see the almost identical development in Syria, where the United States finds itself on the side of terrorists.

To be fair, Obama is not the first president of the United States to actively support terrorists; it would seem that supporting terrorists has been a long-standing policy of the United States government and cuts across party lines.

President Carter supported Ayatollah Khomeini and called him a “peaceful and holy man.” In August 1982, Ronald Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon to save the Palestine Liberation Organization from complete annihilation when the Israelis cornered terrorists in Beirut. Just think about this utterly obscene picture-American Marines protecting PLO terrorists. America paid a heavy price for the involvement when 241 U.S. Marines died in a terrorist attack on their compound at Beirut International Airport in October 1983. President Clinton turned down at least three offers by foreign governments to help seize Osama bin Laden.

When Jeremiah Alvesta Wright Jr., Obama’s “spiritual mentor,” proclaimed in a sermon that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” although it was a reprehensible statement, he may have had a point. Decades of frolicking with terrorists bears a heavy price, and it’s an interesting mental exercise to play “if only.” If only President Carter had not betrayed the Shah of Iran, contemporary Iran would not be run by ayatollahs. If only President Reagan had not sent the Marines to Lebanon, the Israelis would have eliminated the PLO once and for all and thousands of Israelis and 241 brave Marines would still be alive. If only President Clinton had killed Osama bin Laden, 9/11 might never have happened. If only America was more prudent, our leaders more determined. If only…our presidents and the American people had learned from history.

The president, by practicing the politics of appeasement, has a difficult time coming to terms with the teachings of his ideological mentor and the father of modern terrorism, Vladimir Lenin. Lenin, who both perpetrated terrorism and was on the receiving end, taught that “Terror can be conquered only with greater terror.”

Fallows, a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, has argued at least as far back as 2006 that we had al Qaeda on the run, and that even though its “successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers… its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing.”

There is some undeniable truth to this. All one has to do is look at how Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, who wasn’t even successful in his attempt to bring down Flight 63 from Paris to Miami twelve years ago, transformed our air travel experience into a tedious, massively bureaucratic and intrusive TSA nightmare, detrimentally impacting our economy in the process (in a succinct summation of Fallows’ argument, famed atheist Richard Dawkins recently tweeted his irritation over what he deemed the pointless idiocy of airport security extremes: “Bin Laden has won.”). And of course, one could look at how terrorist acts have resulted, even more intrusively, in the surveillance state that emerged under George W. Bush and which has metastasized exponentially under Barack Obama.

“But if it saves a few lives…” goes the seemingly reasonable rationale for all this “security.” Of course we should protect American lives; the question is, are there more effective and reasonable ways to accomplish that and to combat terrorism which also don’t require severely diminishing our freedoms and individual rights?

Fallows acknowledges the seriousness of terrorist acts themselves. “Attacks can be terribly destructive, as we saw in hideous form 12 years ago,” he continued in last week’s article. “But the long-term threat to national interests and values comes from the response they invoke. In the case of 9/11: the attack was disastrous, but in every measurable way the rash, foolish, and unjustified decision to retaliate by invading Iraq hurt America in more lasting ways.”

Perhaps Fallows misspoke here, because surely he knows we didn’t invade Iraq in retaliation for the 9/11 attack. We went into Iraq because during a “decade of defiance,” as Bush put it, Saddam Hussein had become an increasingly clear and present danger: harboring terrorists, financing terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction, and ignoring years of UN demands about those weapons. Maybe Fallows means that going after Saddam was an unnecessary extension of the ill-named war on terror, but the “lasting ways” in which America has been hurt in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted more from our ongoing, blood-and-treasure-sucking, nation-building efforts there than from our invasions of those countries.

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.”

This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of country.

Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need.

In Janet Napolitano’s famous formulation, terror attacks are now “man-caused disasters.” And the “global war on terror” is no more. It’s now an “overseas contingency operation.”

Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. But the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of “workplace violence.”

The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others are killed in an al-Qaida-affiliated terror attack — and for days it is waved off as nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration gone bad.

After all, famously declared Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make?

Well, it makes a difference, first, because truth is a virtue.

Second, because if you keep lying to the American people, they may seriously question whether anything you say — for example, about the benign nature of NSA surveillance — is not another self-serving lie.

And third, because leading a country through yet another long twilight struggle requires not just honesty but clarity. This is a president who to this day cannot bring himself to identify the enemy as radical Islam.

Just Tuesday night, explaining the U.S. embassy closures across the Muslim world, he cited the threat from “violent extremism.”

The word “extremism” is meaningless. People don’t devote themselves to being extreme. Extremism has no content. The extreme of what? In this war, an extreme devotion to the supremacy of a radically fundamentalist vision of Islam and to its murderous quest for dominion over all others.

But for President Obama, the word “Islamist” may not be uttered. Language must be devised to disguise the unpleasantness.

This would all be comical and merely peculiar if it didn’t reflect a larger, more troubling reality: The confusion of language is a direct result of a confusion of policy — which is served by constant obfuscation.

Obama doesn’t like this terror war. He particularly dislikes its unfortunate religious coloration, which is why “Islamist” is banished from his lexicon. But soothing words, soothing speeches in various Muslim capitals, soothing policies — “open hand,” “mutual respect” — have yielded nothing.

The war remains. Indeed, under his watch, it has spread. And as commander in chief he must defend the nation.